The thing is, I know that under the bullshit that muffles it, the dick in my head is not the problem I must solve. The problem of my life is that I’m purposeless, often, and when I do have purpose, I can’t control my wandering mind, and I feel a loneliness I think social media can cure; I’m so scattered. Sometimes I have bad discipline and I don’t exercise, and other times when I have good discipline and I do exercise, I hastily confuse the sensual pleasure I feel with sexual pleasure.
Scientists publish that your neuro-emotional development is not complete until twenty-five, and I’m going to behave as though this fact is essential.
How about, as a potential narrative for my life: there was the origin (childhood) and then the wound (adolescence) and then, briefly, the recovery and first try at adulthood. Then there was, for years, as is traditional, the analysis—lived publicly, through literature, discourse, and reenactments. And then the true adulthood, now the pact with myself to put things back together, as it was necessary that they unravel in order to bring the wound to light. Ego is nothing if not complying with the injunction to behave in one’s own interest without setting traps for oneself. And the good superego is as a parent understanding and kind, who only wants what’s best, and doesn’t want to punish. I’ve been swimming in id for years now. It’s not necessary to continue.
Utopia
I am on a plane and I am feeling rather good. Calm and optimistic. I took transit to the airport, waited for no one, and experienced no anxiety on anyone else’s behalf. I was exactly on time, moving at just the pace I like. I feel good and light. I have curiosity and optimism without any feeling that I’m brimming over. At noon tomorrow, Odile will meet me at the Gare du Nord. I may not sleep before this. In the evening I’ll have dinner with Claude and stay over at his apartment, and the next night Odile is playing a show, and I’ll stay at her place. If her boyfriend is uncomfortable with me staying over too many nights, I will be tossed around between apartments, but in all cases there will be someplace for me to sleep. I have no worry at all. Air travel’s incredible. The wine may be free. God is fucking real.
Max stopped by the house this afternoon while I was packing to get the key to sublet in July. I had inadvertently seen him two nights earlier, when I was at the Three Speed with Caroline, and he was ostensibly on a date with the girl he told me he’d broken up with a month and a half prior. Having so recently slept with him, I felt misled witnessing this date, and in being introduced to Cybil, I mostly felt embarrassed, and also a bit stoned, for I had just at that moment biked in from a joint with Maurice/Rebecca/Dylan over euchre. I may have been curt, and I don’t know the extent to which Cybil knows my friendliness with Max. Apparently that night had been their second date since a possible reconciliation, the first having been the previous Wednesday, three nights before we fucked. While I feel it was an ethical misstep to initiate sex with me knowing he was becoming involved again with his former steady, I didn’t feel jealousy, or anything. What I mostly feel is patience, and a knowledge that Max is between things, seeking attention, lonely and flailing.
Who else is having a life. My mother. I had lunch with her today, which I had to chase her down for. She has not been feeling well. Trouble at work, trouble in life, trouble with the family we share. She says she has, in fact, been inconsolably depressed for weeks, and her doctor upped her Wellbutrin prescription, but she doesn’t know what happened, for there seemed to be no trigger for any of this. I felt my heart sink through the week when she was putting off dinner plans by the day, and worried that she’d already stopped working. She hadn’t: she’s there, but how long for? I want my mother not to give up on a life that has some structure and order, because I know the alternative will be worse.
Last night, Blaise organized a reading with Marianne, Morgan, and me. He proposed this when I hit him up for two weeks’ worth of pot and told him I’d been working on things and wanted a place to read them. He just says, I’ll start a speaking series! There he did. The others he chose, close to him, too, were fantastic. Each of us had something so much our own. I wrote a meditation on attachment to an empty sign and a stuck life and what loyalty means when it’s less to a person in their particularity than to some invented form in one’s head that has to do with nothing more than an abstract eagerness for touch, together with a distrust that a touch under any other name could be right. I want to make others feel like I’ve explained something they lack the words to describe. I want to open up ways to think about desire. There wasn’t a single man I cared to seduce in the room, and I felt fucking great. There was a man who I know edits a literary magazine I sent the story to earlier this week. In another life, I’d want him to want to fuck me. Now I want him to publish my fucking story! Dylan came, and later we biked up to see Maurice and Rebecca, who had earlier been at a wedding-rehearsal dinner. We each had a rose gin and tonic (the fucking most divine thing), shared a joint, and played cards. No one got drunk, I didn’t come home sad that I wasn’t fucking anyone, and these are my fucking friends for life. It was my last night in Toronto for two and a half months, and I couldn’t have asked for a better one.
* * *
Arrived. Spent the night at Claude’s because Odile’s relationship with Anton has become bumpy, and she expressed queasiness at having me at her apartment two days before I left Toronto. I expected that if I asked to stay at Claude’s apartment, he would try to sleep with me, and I was correct. Earlier, surprisingly, I had a very lovely time with him. I was received at the train station at noon by Odile, who took me to lunch before bringing me along to her friend’s house. I was completely exhausted, certain we would not be stopping by her and Anton’s. I asked Claude if I could stop by his place a couple of hours earlier than planned, to nap, and he said yes, and there was simply no substitute for this—I don’t know what I would have done without it. For a couple of hours, he worked and I slept, neither of us disturbed, until he woke me to walk down to the Bastille for Moroccan food. Bizarre that he chose a restaurant an hour’s walk from his apartment by Crimée, but the walk was lovely, full of my memories of the Parisian northeast, and he was lovely to talk to. In the past he’d been exhaustingly didactic with his Marx and his Hegel, and considering the demands of the graduate program he moved here for, I expected even worse, but got instead, thankfully, conversation.
We spoke personally—of goals, relationships, family—in articulate terms. Claude is physically beautiful, mostly in just the ways I like: small, compact but strong frame, a nice mouth, slightly too much hair on his head. He’s smart, and sometimes very stimulating for me, but there’s just something. There’s a certain warmth toward him I lack totally. I really do not feel attracted to this person who by all accounts it would make sense that I would be attracted to. I could give this lack of attraction reasons—sometimes I think he is a bit emotionally stupid, unaware, patronizing, not always respectful—but these qualities have not stopped me from being attracted to others! Maybe it’s that they coalesce in Claude to a degree of masculinity that is unbearable. Maybe it’s that in all his free avowal of affection for and attraction to me, I don’t see any vulnerability in him. I just think of him as a playboy.
But: conversation was great! Nice discussion of Catholic versus Protestant ethics. It brought clarity to certain ideas I’ve had about the religiosity that seeks God in others—in ritual and presence—rather than a private, elected relationship to a supreme impersonal essence that doesn’t have much to do with life on the ground, more concerned with cleanliness and abstinence. I’d earlier thought this latter sort might be the default for irritating, intellectual, late-conversion Christians, but it might be just Protestantism rather than Catholicism. It was great! And when he kissed me by the canal, I was happy for it; I smiled and enjoyed it. He kisses in a way that’s compatible with me, and he held me with a force I liked a lot. It was, in terms of pure sensuality, better than any embrace I’ve had in some time, but it was just, I don’t know, without.
I had no idea how to return to his apartment and not fuck him since I’d been active in kissing, and how I did this was: passively and gracelessly. I just stopped responding to anything, but this did not make him stop, because I suppose nothing makes certain people stop, short of saying, stop. He didn’t force fucking, and he didn’t take out his dick, but he did, sort of, just continue kissing and humping for so much longer than I would have expected one could without garnering a response. What became most alienating to me was that he could continue to be turned on despite my inactivity and my occasional slaps of his hand from my panties. I collected myself and told him that it wasn’t working for me, that this is not how I behave when I’m “feeling the way I usually feel doing this,” that I’m normally aggressive! He still went at it, again. Some moans of my name. I resented that he did not stop when I made it verbally clear I wasn’t comfortable, and I wasn’t about to fucking reward him for this.
Maybe I’m not attracted to Claude because he is the sort of person who can go on like this. I preferred the physical sensations of being with Claude to those of recently being with Max, but Max brings out such lightness and affection in me. For all the hours of talking we did last night, Claude didn’t bring out any. I slept better next to Claude than I would have next to someone I cared for, and we woke up late this morning. I packed up my things, Odile finally in her apartment to welcome me. When at last I arrived there, it was lovely! She and Anton made a nice, late lunch. The apartment is beautiful, bright, back in Montreuil. Since then I’ve walked into the city along routes I remember, not terribly affected by last night’s discomfort. It’s sunny. Pyramids of baklava and basbousa flood out of the convenience stores onto the street. I like being flooded with memories even of uncertain, lonely times. It makes me feel familiar, and like I have some sort of home here, even when, in truth, I don’t. I am now dependent on those I know the city through, and they are kind to let me stay with them. I can sit in a room alone all I want once I’m in Tours for my next course.
I know my desire is not making choices (it certainly isn’t making many good ones!) but I think there is some intuitive judgment about the vulnerability of the other at the heart of it. In Claude, who is smart, beautiful, and quite sexy, there’s just this sort of improvised affectedness that’s missing. I just feel like he’s never surprising himself, always saying something prepared, unreliant upon me, that he was ready to say prior. And though I do become attracted to people who vacillate and reject, I don’t ever become attracted to those I see as truly untouched by me. I like the stumbling, the inadvertent jokes, the speech obviously conjured anew, the guileless (if noncommittal) “It’s another world in your world.”
Despite my romances going, by and large, badly, there is something a little vigilant about my desire. Before any kiss, I mentioned to Claude (unexpectedly!) that there were certain people for whom I’d always have a feeling of lingering erotic warmth (and so, too, would always value the same feeling in kind). It’s a changeless feeling of privileged warmth that no interceding love or infatuation can take away, that can always be invigorated. It’s a way of colouring these people that supersedes any feeling of debt or betrayal or resentment. What forms it is unclear—but I think it involves a mutual puncturing. There’s a certain kind of warmth I’m never going to stop feeling for those I’ve been nude with who’ve displayed vulnerability with me, and who came to conclusions in my presence they wouldn’t have come to if I weren’t there. I want the vulnerability of someone who goes soft if he thinks he’s being denied, not the self-invigorated lover who then gets harder and doubles down.
Oh, very funny line way back one week ago from night walk with Max in the park, talking about jerking off. I said that in my case there’s no filth, no product, and no feeling of exhaustion for having made any. Max said to this: I wish every time you came, a little bit of my come came out. This was a very funny and wholly surprising thing to hear him say. Romantic in a very strange way. The funniest exchange of my evening with Claude was when, excited for discourse on the street, I asked, “Oh my god, when we get back to your apartment, do you want to sit and read for, like, three hours?!” and he said, “No?!”
* * *
Life is fast. Tonight I move to Villejuif for a short while to make some room for Odile’s romantic strife. Last night at a party after her show, I met a lovely young American named Miles. He is going to Tarnac on Monday. I am going to some Marxist banquet in Levallois-Perret he invited me to, today. Last night I gave him a blow job in the bedroom of the house where the party was. This was fun to do. Last night, also, one of the young women at my reading wrote me to say she can’t get my story out of her head. Life is so large out of one’s bedroom. This afternoon, after Odile left the apartment, has been the first time I’ve actually been alone since arriving (I have been by myself in cafés and on the street, but of course there is another way in which this couldn’t be further from alone).
* * *
If there’s any more appropriate way to spend Father’s Day than in a flophouse with a bunch of itinerant communist (criminals?) in Île-St-Denis, I’d have to be made aware of it. I am currently feeling appropriately open to one sort of terrific life, a communistic one with little need of privacy. Who did I have sex with? Was it Miles? Yes. Once yesterday early in the evening and once this morning prior to the group’s departure to Tarnac. Yesterday, after spending the morning with Odile, I packed up enough for a few nights elsewhere and took the metro from one terminus to another to Levallois-Perret—a suburb I’d only ever visited to babysit for a very well-to-do French family—for a sit-in in front of an intelligence agency. Lazing people, food prepared, eighteen-to-thirty-five demographic. I arrived near the end, and Miles, who had written me an email to invite me after we met the night prior, had just woken up from a nap on the grass. I met a few friends and was reminded of the names of a couple of others from last night—Hector, Roman, a lovely PhD dropout from Montreal named Sophia, and her partner, Phillipe. Two Swedish girls. Two American girls? Miles, Hector, and Roman are all American, from the South. They’re clever, driven, political, mysterious. Of the three, Hector is the youngest, perhaps only twenty-two. Roman is, by the look of it, twenty-five to twenty-seven, the funniest one, moved from Atlanta to Sweden, the wiliest of them, the criminal, the liar. Miles is twenty-six, does building projects in New Orleans, will do the same here, the most polite, did the most cleaning at the homestead, handsome, big eyes, very muscular chest and arms, light hair. Everyone is clean, well-dressed, and shaven although they live in a certain sort of squalor, to which we took a very convenient bus.
So often, I idealize being with others, but when actually finding myself with them, I don’t want to stay for long—the demands of the interpersonal become something to retreat from. But this group had accustomed themselves to being with one another in a way that wouldn’t demand retreat, and I found myself at home. After our arrival to the house, any one of us could do just as we pleased: chat, pass books around, cook, play cards. Miles and I excused ourselves to an only slightly more secluded room for a fucking, and, honest on my life, one of the Swedish girls had—just as he was about to come—played “Heart of Glass” on the stereo. There was no, what am I doing here? Simply by being there, one could do anything. I met only one person who actually lived in this house, Patrick, from the pacific northwest, who studies philosophy at L’Ecole normale supérieure. He keeps the doors unlocked, and friends from the neighbourhood filter in and out all day, including this fun little kid, Moussa, couldn’t be older than nine, who would come in and joke with us, scribble adornments on protest signs with markers, try to persuade us to play soccer with him. The communists’ relationship with the children of the neighbourhood was primarily established, I’m told, by buying fireworks from them. Hours passed between undemanding activities, and I never got bored or antsy. Final conversation of the night with Sophia, Miles, Hector, Patrick, on Fourier and Lacan and desire and attachment and action. Every
one came at praxis from some different place. This morning while fucking, Miles joked with me, as he struggled to put curtains up, that he was not a Fourierist. I said, no, me neither! Nothing bothered me. In this environment, I was hardly ever hungry, hardly felt I had any needs to meet—I ate a little tabbouleh and had a tiny beer, a little wine, all night—no coffee in the morning until after I left, no cigarettes. Above all else, I just had no feeling of demand.
* * *
It is later, and I have fucked two such different Marxists today. It could be said that I am living one among the dreams, but it is a very strange dream. They both talked to me with deference about Fourier, who has become my party trick. What an obvious choice for a cute, quirky, eccentric party trick for sex. The second Marxist was just Claude. If you look at someone sucking your tits for long enough, it is likely to become pornographic. Life is stupid but not absolutely bad. Not distinctly. What I would like is two fans. If I think of a joke while cuddling, but, out of politeness, remain cuddling instead of going to jot it down and then lose the joke, I feel cheated.
* * *
I feel such a quick and resigned flexibility to my present circumstances. This trip is not what I expected. Odile, since last time, is different, or at least in a much more tumultuous time in her life. So I cart my things around Paris, or rather around its environs, thankful that I nevertheless do have places to stay, and if some of those places have been contingent upon sexual exchange, at least it’s been with people I’ve not been totally repulsed by. This afternoon, again in Montreuil, I slept in after Anton went to work and Odile went to visit her therapist, before going down with a packed suitcase to Villejuif to a house of her band friends where she’ll also be staying for a short break from Anton—which will be the beginning, presumably, of a lifelong break from Anton. In the midst of her breakup, she has been kind enough to ensure that I have someplace to sleep, but also, I think, has not asked me a single question about my last two years in Toronto. I’m a single woman floating around. She has a passionate distractability.
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